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When documentarians Andrew Jarecki and Charlotte Kaufman entered the Easterling facility in 2019, they encountered a deceptively cheerful scene. Similar to the state's Alabama prisons, Easterling largely prohibits journalistic access, but allowed the filmmakers to record its yearly community-organized cookout. During film, incarcerated individuals, mostly African American, celebrated and laughed to musical performances and religious talks. However behind the scenes, a contrasting story emerged—horrific assaults, unreported violent attacks, and indescribable brutality swept under the rug. Pleas for assistance were heard from overheated, dirty housing units. When Jarecki moved toward the sounds, a corrections officer halted filming, stating it was unsafe to speak with the inmates without a police chaperone.

“It was very clear that certain sections of the prison that we were forbidden to see,” the filmmaker recalled. “They use the idea that it’s all about security and safety, since they don’t want you from comprehending what they’re doing. These facilities are similar to black sites.”

A Stunning Documentary Uncovering Years of Abuse

That interrupted barbecue event begins The Alabama Solution, a stunning new documentary made over six years. Collaboratively directed by Jarecki and his partner, the feature-length production reveals a gallingly broken system rife with unchecked abuse, compulsory work, and extreme cruelty. It documents prisoners’ tremendous efforts, under constant physical threat, to improve situations declared “unconstitutional” by the US justice department in 2020.

Covert Footage Reveal Horrific Realities

Following their abruptly ended prison visit, the directors made contact with men inside the state prison system. Guided by veteran activists Bennu Hannibal Ra-Sun and Robert Earl Council, a network of insiders supplied multiple years of footage recorded on contraband mobile devices. The footage is ghastly:

• Rat-infested cells
• Heaps of excrement
• Rotting meals and blood-stained floors
• Routine officer violence
• Men carried out in remains pouches
• Hallways of men unresponsive on drugs sold by officers

Council begins the documentary in five years of solitary confinement as punishment for his activism; later in production, he is almost killed by officers and suffers sight in an eye.

A Case of Steven Davis: Violence and Obfuscation

Such brutality is, the film shows, standard within the prison system. As incarcerated witnesses continued to collect proof, the filmmakers looked into the killing of Steven Davis, who was assaulted unrecognizably by guards inside the William E Donaldson prison in October 2019. The documentary follows the victim's parent, a family member, as she seeks answers from a uncooperative ADOC. She discovers the state’s version—that Davis menaced guards with a knife—on the news. But multiple imprisoned observers told Ray’s lawyer that Davis wielded only a toy knife and surrendered immediately, only to be beaten by multiple guards anyway.

One of them, Roderick Gadson, smashed the inmate's head off the hard surface “like a basketball.”

After three years of evasion, Sandy Ray met with the state's “tough on crime” top lawyer Steve Marshall, who told her that the authorities would not press criminal counts. Gadson, who faced numerous separate legal actions alleging excessive force, was promoted. The state paid for his defense costs, as well as those of every guard—part of the $51 million spent by the government in the last half-decade to protect officers from wrongdoing lawsuits.

Compulsory Work: A Modern-Day Slavery Scheme

This state benefits economically from ongoing imprisonment without supervision. The film describes the alarming scope and double standard of the prison system's labor program, a forced-labor system that essentially functions as a modern-day mutation of historical bondage. The system provides $450 million in goods and services to the state annually for virtually no pay.

In the program, imprisoned laborers, overwhelmingly Black Alabamians considered unsuitable for society, earn $2 a day—the identical pay scale established by Alabama for imprisoned workers in 1927, at the height of Jim Crow. These individuals work more than half a day for corporate entities or public sites including the government building, the executive residence, the judicial branch, and local government entities.

“They trust me to work in the public, but they don’t trust me to grant release to get out and return to my loved ones.”

These laborers are numerically more unlikely to be released than those who are do not participate, even those considered a greater security threat. “This illustrates you an understanding of how important this free workforce is to Alabama, and how important it is for them to keep people locked up,” stated the director.

Prison-wide Protest and Continued Struggle

The documentary culminates in an remarkable achievement of organizing: a system-wide inmates' strike demanding better treatment in October 2022, organized by an activist and his co-organizer. Illegal cell phone video reveals how prison authorities ended the strike in 11 days by starving inmates collectively, choking the leader, deploying soldiers to threaten and attack others, and cutting off communication from strike leaders.

A National Issue Beyond Alabama

The strike may have ended, but the message was evident, and beyond the state of the region. Council concludes the film with a call to action: “The abuses that are occurring in this state are happening in your region and in the public's behalf.”

Starting with the documented violations at the state of New York's Rikers Island, to the state of California's use of over a thousand imprisoned firefighters to the danger zones of the LA fires for less than standard pay, “you see comparable things in most states in the union,” said Jarecki.

“This is not only Alabama,” said Kaufman. “We’re witnessing a resurgence of ‘tough on crime’ approaches and rhetoric, and a punitive approach to {everything